I am one of America’s top communication theorists and coaches -- and I'm a speaker myself on storytelling, body language, persuasion, and influence. A passionate teacher, I am committed to helping people find clarity in their thinking and ideas – and then delivering them with panache. I have been commissioned by Fortune 50 companies to write for many CEOs and presidents. I have coached people to give Congressional testimony, to prepare TED talks, and to take on the investment community. I have worked widely with political and educational leaders. And I have spoken, led conferences, and moderated panels at venues around the world. My acclaimed book on public speaking, Working the Room: How to Move People to Action through Audience-Centered Speaking, was published by Harvard in 2003 and reprinted in paperback in 2005 as Give Your Speech, Change the World: How to Move Your Audience to Action. My book on authentic communications, Trust Me, was published by Jossey-Bass in January 2009. My latest book, Power Cues, deals with the science of influence, leadership and body language and was published by Harvard in May 2014.

Are You Being Lied To?

Recently, a psychologist decided to put an end to the misinformation around lying with some research, and the results both reinforced and undercut our common sense, traditional take on this important bit of human behavior.

First of all, as I have been noting in this blog for some time, you have to let go of the idea of “tells” – those specific gestures that give away liars. They’re not reliable. Presumably this is bad news for poker players, too.

Second, what you should look for is a group of signals that, taken together, are a pretty good clue that the person in question is lying (unless, of course, they’ve read the article too and have taken steps accordingly). Those signals are: hand touching, touching the face, crossing arms, and leaning away.

Again, look for all of these, not individual tells. It takes a village of signs.

Here’s the really important point of this research. The more of these cues that show up in the people we talk to, the more we are inclined to think that they are untrustworthy – unconsciously. We might still like the person – but we don’t trust them. We think they’re lying.

Because most of this sort of evaluation of our fellow human beings occurs unconsciously, we have a hard time making it part of conscious thought. The conscious mind can only handle something like 40 bits of information a second, whereas the unconscious mind handles 11 million bits. So we’ve evolved to push a lot of important work down to our unconscious minds, including evaluating trust.

It’s hard work to start looking for these signs with your conscious mind, or to monitor yourself for them when you want to increase trust. But, with practice, you can increase your facility in both reading and projecting trust or its opposite consciously.

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The subconscious is a strata of consciousness – ie it is below our consciousness. Thus, we may be unconscious of thoughts that are in our subconscious, but it’s grammatically incorrect to describe a thought as being unconscious.